Silver Bullet
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From Backwoods Home Magazine :
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/silveira49.html
Who Were the Best and Worst U.S. Presidents ?
...
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/silveira49.html
Who Were the Best and Worst U.S. Presidents ?
...
Okay, I’ll bite. Who do you think were the greatest Presidents?”
Mac didn’t think but a second and said, “Oh, I guess I’d take most—maybe all—of the first 15 Presidents and put them at or near the top...”
“Who was the 16th President?” I asked.
“Lincoln...and just a few of the postbellum Presidents from the 19th century like Arthur, Cleveland, McKinley...”
“...and I’d add a handful of the Republican Presidents from the 20th century.”
“Reagan, Bush...?” Dave asked.
“No, not them. Harding, Coolidge, Hoover...that’s it, though I’d put Ford higher on the list than any President since Hoover.”
“Ford?” Bill asked. “He was a do-nothing President. He was in the House of Representatives for 22 years and he never even introduced a bill.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
I think we were all a little startled by Mac’s response.
“If you want an activist President, you’re probably a Democrat,” he said, “although you may also be a modern-day Republican. If you want a President who leaves the people alone, you’re probably an old-time Republican, a 19th century Democrat, or—and this is more likely—a modern-day Libertarian.”
Bill said, “Most intellectuals think guys like Wilson and F.D.R. belong at the top. In fact, I’ve seen several lists where F.D.R. is at the very top.”
“Why do you think he’s there?” Mac asked without looking away from the pan.
“Well, he got us out of Hoover’s Depression...”
“I don’t know why people call it Hoover’s Depression,” Mac said. “Hoover was President for only three and a half years of the Great Depression while F.D.R. was President for eight of them, right up until the beginning of World War Two, when the Depression ‘officially’ ended. In fact, under Roosevelt, and in spite of all his programs, the Depression deepened. Five years into his Presidency, in 1938, it was worse than ever. You can’t blame that on Hoover; a Democratic President and Democratic Congress had been in power for five years. In fact, many economists have fielded strong arguments that show that F.D.R.’s meddling may have actually made the Depression worse.”
“So you base your criteria on how the country is doing economically,” Bill said.
“No, although I’ll admit I’m a financial conservative. But most of my criteria is based on the Constitution.” He started taking the fried fillets out of the pan.
Dave said, “Then your criteria is...” and he hesitated for a second.
“How closely a President adheres to the Constitution,” Mac said finishing Dave’s sentence for him.
“But I get the impression Lincoln’s not on your list,” I said.
He shook his head as he lifted some fish from the frying pan with a spatula.
“Come and get it,” he said as he took more fillets and dropped them into the hot oil.
“Why isn’t he on your list?” I asked.
“Lincoln was the first President to violate the Constitution wholesale. Before him, every President tried to live within its framework.
“What was different about the first 15 Presidents?” Dave asked.
“The first 15 Presidents all operated within the framework of the Constitution—with a few, though noteworthy, exceptions.
“But more importantly, some of those Presidents are unfairly maligned today because they chose to act within the framework of the Constitution.”
“The one who stands out most is James Buchanan, the President who preceded Lincoln.”
“What did he do?”
“It’s what he didn’t do. He refused to act when South Carolina seceded from the Union. That secession was followed by the secession of the 10 other states after Lincoln was elected, and they went on to form the Confederacy.”
“Why didn’t he do something?”
“He said there was no constitutional basis for using force to keep them in the Union. And, actually, he was right.”
“So, what did Lincoln do?”
“He threatened military force to stop it.”
“But he had to,” Bill said.
“Why?”
“To free the slaves.”
“The Civil War wasn’t about slavery; it was about preserving the Union. It wasn’t about the Constitution and it wasn’t about freedom. And I’m not sure it was worth killing half a million people to keep the country intact just because some wanted to leave. Keep in mind that the South was not a foreign invader.”
“That’s how many died during the Civil War?” I asked.
“That’s the total,” Mac replied. “And after hundreds of thousands died to keep it together, there’s still nothing in the Constitution that says states can’t leave.
“The issue of slavery,” he added, “may have helped bring on secession, but it wasn’t the reason for the war.”
“I think you’re wrong,” I said. “Everything I learned in school said that war was fought to free the slaves.”
He crossed the office and picked up Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and leafed through it. “Might as well quote Lincoln himself,” he said. “In a letter to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, Lincoln wrote: My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
“Ending slavery was a noble purpose, but the war was fought over secession. Had the 11 states that made up the Confederacy not seceded, neither Lincoln nor the Congress would have sent troops into the South to end slavery. Slavery would simply have died its natural death as it did in other countries.”
“What about the Emancipation Proclamation?” I asked.
“The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in those states under control of the Confederacy. It did not free any of the slaves in the border states where the slaves were owned by Union sympathizers.”
“Really?”
“Yes, read it.”
“You say he violated the Constitution?” Dave asked.
“He tromped all over the very document that makes this country worthwhile and has made it different from any other country that has ever existed in history.”
“Give me some examples,” Dave said.
“In creating the state of West Virginia, he violated Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution which says the federal government cannot form states from the jurisdiction of any of the states without the consent of the state legislature and the Congress.
“The taxes he levied to support the war, and the draft he imposed on the North were unconstitutional.
“The Writ of Habeas Corpus and the Bill of Rights were suspended. He summarily imprisoned critics and even had an arrest warrant written to jail the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Taney, because he not only ruled that many of Lincoln’s actions were unconstitutional, he was also a vocal Lincoln critic.”
“But these things had to be done; otherwise, the United States wouldn’t be as it is now,” Bill said.
“Then you would have to say taking land from the Indians, breaking our treaties with them, and the kidnapping of Africans to bring them to this continent as forced, unpaid labor was okay because, without them, the United States wouldn’t be what it is today.”
“At the end of the last century, William Jennings Bryan single-handedly changed the course of the Democratic Party by stepping away from Constitutional law and slipping into a kind of populism that was sweeping the country. Then it changed again in the 1920s when fascism swept the world.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
Adopting fascism
“The Democrats—and, since the 1950s, the Republicans—adopted fascist policies.”
“Oh, come on,” Bill said. “Are you saying the Democrats are Fascists? Fascists are right wingers.”
“Despite the fact we identify fascism with Hitler and Mussolini, they were just two people among many who embraced fascist policies.”
“What is fascism?” I asked
“If you look at capitalism as the concept of private ownership, and communism as no private ownership with everything owned by the state, fascism recognizes private ownership but the use of private property is directed by the state.”
“Can you give us a concrete example?” Dave asked.
“The environmentalists wanting the state to direct the use of industry and private property is a fascist concept,” Mac said.
Bill slammed his hand on the table. “You’re saying the environmental movement is a fascist movement?”
“If the word fascist bothers you, Bill, and it is now a word that carries a lot of emotional baggage because of the Nazis, then substitute another word, but the philosophy is the same.
“I believe that if it hadn’t been for Hitler, today’s bureaucrats and politicians would have no problem admitting the use of fascist policies. Before World War Two, men like F.D.R. and Winston Churchill openly admired Benito Mussolini and his fascist government. What they admired was the economics of fascism and its approach to property rights.”
Bill just shook his head, but Dave said, “When the Clintons first took office...”
“Only one of them did,” Mac said and Dave laughed.
“Okay, when Bill did, they wanted to institute a national health plan and explained it would be managed competition. Is that fascism?”
“That’s right.”
“Fascism is about zero tolerance and persecution,” Bill said.
“Fascism is just an economic theory, Bill. It’s not about concentration camps any more than communism is about gulags and Siberia. Hitler didn’t need fascism any more than Stalin or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia needed communism to carry out their atrocities.”
“So, what if you had to make a list where you rated the Presidents? What would it look like?” Dave asked.
“I’d organize my list in five tiers, with the top tier being the Presidents I thought were the best in maintaining the values we find in the Constitution, and the bottom tier being those who ‘took the law into their own hands.’
“In each tier, I’ll just list the Presidents chronologically:
“On the first tier I would put almost any one of the first 15 Presidents, and a few others. This would include:
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Quincy Adams
Andrew Jackson
Martin Van Buren
John Tyler
James Polk
Zachary Taylor
Millard Fillmore
Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
Rutherford Hayes
James Garfield
Chester Arthur
Grover Cleveland
Benjamin Harrison
William McKinley
Warren Harding
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
Howard Taft
“On the second tier I’d put:
John Adams
Andrew Johnson
Ulysses Grant
“On the third I’d put:
Harry Truman
John Kennedy
Gerald Ford
On the fourth:
Theodore Roosevelt
Woodrow Wilson
Dwight Eisenhower
Lyndon Johnson
Richard Nixon
Jimmy Carter
Ronald Reagan
George Bush
Bill Clinton
“And at the bottom I’d put:
Abraham Lincoln
Franklin Roosevelt